Mina-san,

What did you think of Yoshikai’s voice acting?

Yoroshiku onegai shimasu!

Great lesson! とても面白かったです。Loved the bonus track too. It’s great, even though I have been studying japanese for ~3 years I learned a lot of new words with this Beginner Lesson (i.e. かかし、玉蜀黍）

btw, for anyone interested, かかし　actually has kanji too: 案山子. So does カラス：烏　。I find this last kanji very easy to remember, as it’s the same as the kanji for “bird” (鳥）but without that one stroke to make the top part “white” （白）. Makes sense, as crows aren’t white, they are black! the kanji in 玉蜀黍 is interesting too: jewel + green caterpillar + millet = sweet corn. 面白い！

I am a little shocked and confused
isn’t passiv meant that the object of the aktive sentence to become the subject of the passive? And acording to this shouldn’t とうもろこしbe marked by が? instead of を?

My wife says no so I am thinking about trusting her and your great lesson. But could someone explain why I am wrong?

Thank you in advance

Hanspeter

本当に第400目のレッソンの？すご～いよね☆
JP101組みがこんなに頑張ってくれてありがとう！

そして、ボーナス・トラックについて．．．

Here’s the Japanese Wikipedia article for 北の国から: http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%8C%97%E3%81%AE%E5%9B%BD%E3%81%8B%E3%82%89
And this appears to be the opening of a ‘95 episode of the drama: http://youtube.com/watch?v=P1-9WT1fj58
And this is Fuji TV’s page for season ‘02: http://www.fujitv.co.jp/jp/furano/index2.html

Hanspeter, I’m not sure exactly what example you’re referring to, but the Japanese passive can be a little tricky at times (at least as far as particles are concerned).

If there’s just an object and someone doing an action, you have:

母はケーキを食べた。 My mom ate the cake.
ケーキが母に食べられた。 The cake was eaten by my mom.

Let’s say, though, that there are two people involved.

母が私のケーキを食べた。 My mom ate my cake.
私は母にケーキを食べられた。 I had my cake eaten by my mom.

In Japanese, the passive tense is sometimes used to convey negative emotions. Thus, the emotion “and I was angry” is conveyed in the second example above.

This isn’t always necessarily the case (i.e. you can use the passive tense and not imply negative emotion), but if you want to be sure that you’re not misinterpreted, instead of このケーキは母に作られた (this cake was made by my mom), you could say:

このケーキは母が作った。
これは母が作ったケーキだ。
母がこのケーキを作った。

And one last thing on the use of the passive tense to imply negativity–sometimes you see sentences in Japanese like, 「昨日雨に降られた」 meaning, “yesterday I was rained on (and it was inconvenient).” But notice that although there’s no subject nor object in the Japanese version of the sentence, it’s still grammatically correct.

Michelleさん,
Thanks for the additional information on forming sentences using the passive, particularly this example:
私は母にケーキを食べられた。 I had my cake eaten by my mom.
That’s a new structure for me & I’m going to have to think about it, as it doesn’t feel ‘obvious’ yet, if you catch my meaning. If asked to translate into japanese, I would have tried:
私のケーキが母に食べられた。My cake was eaten by my mom.
Does that work too? I am certainly troubled by the passive.

Hmmm….Yoshikaiさんの声は。。。最高です！面白くて、お上手ですね。会話は、本当にYoshikaiさんだけでしたか？

-Hugo

Thank you very much ミシェルさんfor your long explanations.
I was refering to: “karasu ni tōmorokoshi o taberareru”;
Some kind more astonishing つまexplained that if I would substitue karasu with neko and tōmorokoshi with nezumi she would think it would be correct to say:
nezumi ga neko ni taberaremashita.
Perhaps she feels a little pitty for the mouse? but not for the corn , (which she herself likes to eat in opposit to mice)

Hanspeter

ミシェルさん、貴方の説明はとても大事でした。

ペーターさん、how can you say English has so many verb tenses???!!!!!
You certainly haven’t seen Portuguese yet, have you???

I’ve been away for a while and I can really notice how the level of comments has increased. I’m amazed. Everybody is becoming an expert in Japanese!!!

Keep it coming, folks…

また

(first off, sorry for the double posting earlier… sometimes I can’t get posts to go through at all, and sometimes they seem to be held in a sort of holding pattern… for moderation?)

Anyhow, Alan–I admit that the use of passive tense isn’t really one of my strong points, but from what I understand, 私のケーキが母に食べられた (My cake was eaten by my mom) is grammatically correct… for example, search for the phrase “母に食べられた” on google, and you’ll come up with tons of hits. It just has a different nuance than “私は母にケーキを食べられた”

Here are a few passive voice-related links:
http://homepage3.nifty.com/i-yasu/Lesson17.htm
http://www.njuku.com/?cat=6 (scroll down to “emotional passive tense”)

皆さん

日本語で受身動詞はちょっとややこしいですね。

I’d like a to make a suggestion to the Jpod team to make it easier for us to spot the ’suffering passive’ by translating it carefully based on its meaning rather than attempting a literal translation- this is not ‘passive’ as the latin word intended, that is , it is not to do with action ‘passing’ to the subjed from a third party- maybe we should start referring to this as a completely separate construction altogether.

It is one of the difficult idiomatic constructions to translate- there is no way it can be done literally and no wonder お父さん got confused in school!

In カラスに玉蜀黍を食べられる the give away is the をparticle.

I think it would be more appropriate to translate カラスに玉蜀黍を食べられる as ‘we’ll get the corn eaten by the crows’ [as the る ending is also used for the future in Japanese, remember?] to emphasise the fact that the person speaking is involved. Since the をparticle marks the object, the subject of the sentence in this case would be is ‘we’ as in:

私たちはカラスに玉蜀黍を食べられる

カラスに玉蜀黍が食べられる just means a less emotionally charged /more neutral statement of fact: ‘the corn is eaten by the crows’-

So, 子供ちゃん, these sentences are not the same thing! お父さん said, “we’ll get all the corn eaten up by those flipping crows! ”- he did not just give you the information on what the crows eat.

宜しくお願いします

mikuji

Question: In the last lesson, Peter-san mentions u and a columns in his explanation of the verb form. Can you either point me to an online reference on your site on the web that would help explain what the columns are (in relationship to verbs) and how they are used?

Thanks in advance

Tryllid.